The White House announced Saturday that President Obama will meet Tuesday in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. | AP photo composite by POLITICO

Why Israelis and Palestinians will meet

A day after U.S. special envoy George Mitchell left Israel with no deal on a resumption of peace talks in the region, the White House announced Saturday that President Barack Obama will meet Tuesday in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. That meeting will be immediately preceded by separate meetings between Obama and each leader, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement.

The announcement changed the Mideast headline from “stalemate” to “breakthrough” as the Obama administration enters a week in which foreign policy takes center stage, with the president appearing at both the opening of the United Nations General Assembly and the G20 economic meetings in Pittsburgh.

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But all parties say it's unlikely the Tuesday meeting will be accompanied by a long-sought announcement on the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. That requires still more negotiations.

It's a meeting that seems to have come about in large part because of pressure on all sides to talk, as well as concerns about who would get blamed if they didn't — Netanyahu for resisting U.S. demands to halt settlement activity, Abbas for refusing to come if settlement activity hadn't ceased, Arab governments for stalling on good will gestures to Israel until it achieved peace with the Palestinians, or Obama for pushing preconditions for talks that he couldn't get the parties to agree to.

A U.S. official cautioned that the announcement amounted to more of a symbolic than substantive breakthrough. “The sides agreed to this because of their respect for the president and his standing," the official said. "We still have work to do to get to the point where we can relaunch talks."

"It seems like a good move for all three parties to hold this meeting, although I doubt they'll be a lot of substance in the trilateral meeting," says the American Task Force on Palestine's Hussein Ibish.

Each leader had an interest in the meeting, Ibish said, “no matter what the atmospherics were until now.”

"Obviously, if there had been no meeting after Obama had called for it, the president would've been embarrassed. Indeed, his more extreme critics probably would have used it to say that his entire initiative had ground to a halt already. This was very much to be avoided from his point of view."

Abbas and Netanyahu had their own reasons for wanting the meeting to proceed.

"The Palestinians simply cannot afford to do anything other than support Obama, especially since he is carrying the settlement freeze issue forward as far as it can go with the Israelis through Mitchell.

"As for Netanyahu, obviously the meeting is useful to him as well. This way, he gets further dialogue and acknowledgment, from both the Americans and the Palestinians, without having given up anything publicly on the settlement freeze yet. This is particularly useful to him if he is building up credits with the Israeli right in preparation for an accommodation on settlements with Obama."

For their part, the American negotiators have kept their cards close to their chest. The White House and State Department have held back from describing the substantive disagreements that still have yet to be bridged.

“In the end, it’s going to be up to … both sides to take the kind of steps that they’ve already committed to,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Friday. “And of course, for the Israelis, that means committing to an end to settlement activity; and on the Palestinian side, it means they have to take certain steps to raise the level of trust in their ability to maintain security in the Palestinian territories. “

Israeli officials indicated that Netanyahu was prepared to attend the three-way meeting with Obama and Abbas – his first apparent meeting with the Palestinian, one official said – but were still somewhat skeptical of the whole thing and are resisting announcing the resumption of peace talks at the meeting. Netanyahu “is not necessarily unhappy but we would prefer to get this behind us and focus on the real thing- Iran,” one Israeli official said on condition of anonymity.